We had been planning on putting gardens in our back yard for quite a while now. And as of yesterday May 20, 2017, the seeds are planted! But there was a lot of work that had to be done first, considering the areas used to be grass covering up some red clay.
First step was to outline the area of grass to be terra formed. So naturally I had to move Spike’s (my robotic lawn mower) base, and his border wire. I moved his wire out away from the house, and moved his base next to the AC unit. I then had spike return to his base multiple times, in order to flag his actual border. Spike will go past his border wire several inches, and I don’t want Spike cutting down my garden!
After a few times, I was confident I had a good outline of Spike’s true boundaries, and started cutting a line in the grass. I used a shovel to outline the garden, that was easy enough. I tried several ways of removing the grass, and none of it seemed to be right. The garden area was cut up pretty well in several places, so I decided to use my aerator. Basically a claw on the end of a handle to tear into and mix up the soil. It was quite hard to do, and there was a lot of it to get done.
After a while I decided it was torn up enough, and I started removing the large clumps of grass and other plants that remained on the surface. There was a lot of that too, so I had to just keep on trucking.
Next I tried to level it out a bit by raking the soil. There was a very large crevasse the water had been making for quite some time, so I moved the red soil to even it out. Terraforming level up!
There was another section of grass I wanted to turn into a garden as well. This time I cut smaller sodd sections. It made it faster and easier in the long run. All I had to do was lift out the smaller pieces carefully and toss them in the wheelbarrow. Another level up!
This new garden area was very uneven. It was actually very slanted towards the house. So I stuck a board in the ground as a wall, and started raking the earth over to level the new garden bed. Another level? I also tossed some sodd in a hole to try and fill a divot in the yard.
We had bought two lavender plants a little while back, and they were starting to look sad. So I dug them each a hole and dumped in some of our compost, and some old potting soil we had. One of them seems to be pretty happy, but the other one is undoubtably dead.
The terraforming process is well under way by now. Where there used to be grass, now mostly red clay can be seen. So we needed better soil. We wanted to get some compost or top soil from a nearby garden supply place, they were closed! At this point our limited time took us to Home Depot. We picked up 3 bags of mushroom compost and 3 bags of top soil. That then sat on our patio for several days.
After returning home from a camping trip, I was ready to start terraforming again. I poured two bags of both mushroom compost and top soil on the larger back garden, and 1 of each on the smaller garden next to the steps. As well as some stuff I vacuumed out of my gutters, and some other stuff I raked into a pile long ago. After aerating it a few times, it was ready to receive some seeds.
We planted 4 types of sunflowers, two bags of chamomile flowers, some random wild flowers, dill, tarragon, sage, lavender, catnip, cucumbers, butterfly weed, and probably something else I am forgetting.
I also tossed a bunch of sunflower seeds along our fence, and some cucumbers in planter pots. I hope those sunflowers grow, that could look really cool.